The power to save life

The farthest memory that I can think back to, was this moment when I was four. My mother, father, and I were visiting my grandfather up North. My two parents dismissed the visitation by instead parting to a nearby bar. My grandfather and I trotted through his back woods into the delicate winter ashes, to find a grizzled rabbit caught in the teeth of human's metal invention. It's blood seeped like roots into the snow, as it lay in a hopeless curl.

It frightened me to see it, trapped and wounded in the cold. I wandered closer to it until my grandfather snapped me back to him, and warned me that there might be more traps in the area. From hearing that, I anchored myself in place. My grandfather reached above his head to a brittle tree branch, snapped it off its natural connection, and used it to scour the snow like how one would draw in sand. He increasingly inched closer and closer to the wounded animal, prioritizing his own body first and foremost. It almost felt safe until, SNAP, a trap sends half the stick into the woods. He turns his head around to me as he skittishly giggles. He looks back around to find another branch. There were plenty above him, but he wasn't tall enough to reach. He looks back at me and asks if I can grab a branch from where I am. I look at the spot where he grabbed the first and balance on my toes to reach from where he collected it, to no avail. However instead, I take the idea for him to pick me up from where he is and boost me to the branches above him. So I quite literally, follow in his footsteps to his location. Although I suppose I didn't have to, he scoured the ground already, but I wasn't too bright in that moment. I make it to him and he lifts me onto his shoulders. I elongate my arm to the cracked and brittle extension of wood, grab hold, and pull. My grandfather gently lifts me back onto the winter snow, and I had him the branch. Fortunately, he did not find anymore traps in his shortened search, so we then focused our attention on the rabbit. He affirmed me that he knew how to unlock the trap, and unsurprisingly he did. He used to be a sheriff, so of course he's had to deal with illegal hunting and traps. He unravels a blanket he's had rolled up on his back, and carefully envelops the rabbit into the warm embrace of the fabric. It's resistance was minimalistic, it was too weak to fight back.

We start trotting out of the woods the same exact path we came from. He tells me, "I gotta run inside to get towels and the keys to the truck," as he gestures to me to hold the wrapped up creature,"she's losing a lot of blood and we need to put pressure on her wound." I nervously accept the rabbit into my arms as he stomps into the wooden cabin. I could feel its heartbeat, its faint warmth. I was holding a living creature, that was dying. It didn't take long for my grandfather to come back out with his keys and a couple towels. He tells me to hold out the blanket a bit so he can reach in to place the towels inside. The rabbit bites him, and instead of pulling away, my grandfather merely says, "I know hun, it's pretty weird to get this many hands on you at once," thank God I didn't understand that at the time. He instructs me to apply pressure to the wound through the blanket and hold on tight to the rabbit, because she might squirm. And she did. We both got into his truck and started the twenty minute drive to the nearest vet.

There, I coddled the rabbit in my arms as my grandfather demanded a veterinarian. The receptionist climbed out of the reception booth to take the rabbit out my arms, and rushed it into the back. When she took it from me, I realized how much blood the rabbit draped over me. We sat in the waiting area, for two hours. You might think that I became antsy, and I did. I kept pestering my grandfather all these questions, which he calmly replied to every single one of them.
"Why can't we go in there?" I asked. "We don't own her," he replied.
"What are they doing to it?" I asked. "They're checking her for infection, nerve and muscle damage, chance of recovery, and treatment," he answered.
"Will it die?" I asked. "I can't be sure," he stated.

When the veterinarian finally came out to tell us the news, she said that the rabbit would live, and it was on the brink of death, and we saved its life. We got to see the rabbit one last time before we left. It was in a room all to itself, bandaged and lying in a comfy looking dog bed. We walked out the vet and my grandfather emptily vented to me about how dangerous it is for activated traps to just hang around in the woods when it isn't hunting season. He recognized my confusion in his sentences and changed the subject by asking me, "Alright lil man, what did we learn today?"
And it made me reflect on these few hours. The woods, the rabbit, the traps, the vet, our reactions to these events. I stated my ideas: we learned to pack towels for every hike next time, we learned to bring injured animals to the vet, we learned to watch our steps!
He looked at me and said, "Well yes those are important lessons, but the most important lesson we learned is: As humans, he have the power to cause death, but we also have the power to save life."